Share this:

Most actors would kill to get a spot on a hit TV show – and hold on to it for dear life.

That is, most actors besides Nathan Fillion.

The 37-year old Los Angeles transplant – he was born in Edmonton, Alberta – says that he was happy to leave “Desperate Housewives” last season after a year of playing Dr. Adam Mayfair, husband to Dana Delany’s character, Katherine.

“I was prepared to do one season. That’s what I signed on for and that’s all that I was expecting,” Fillion says. “If they asked me to stay longer, I would’ve said, ‘Thank you, but

“I realized that doing [scenes] on ‘Desperate Housewives’ was like doing things in my life – in my regular life, I sit around in my living room and talk to people. In ‘Desperate Housewives,’ I sat around in my living room and talked to people.

“Now, I know I want to do things in my job that I don’t get to do in real life,” he says. That’s exactly what his starring role in the new ABC series “Castle” allows him to do.

Castle faces a career crisis when he kills off his big, money-making character and then develops a severe case of writer’s block.

When a killer starts using his fictional murder scenes as inspiration, Castle happily inserts himself into NYPD Detective Kate Beckett’s (Stana Katic) investigation. From there, a beautiful – from his point of view, and incredibly irritating, from hers – partnership blossoms.

Even though “Firefly” and 2007’s blink-and-you-missed it “Drive” – Fillion’s two previous starring roles – fizzled,

“Castle” executive producer and writer Andrew Marlowe says that when he cast the Canadian-born actor in his series, he wasn’t worried about what he jokingly refers to as “the jinx of Nathan Fillion.”

“It’s a matter of finding the right vehicle for the right personality and I just don’t think that Nathan was given the opportunity to be this type of leading man [before],” Marlowe says.

“Some of the other things he’s been in haven’t taken advantage of his whole range of talents. The character of Castle is somebody who has many sides and Nathan is the complete package – he can be very serious and sensitive, but also a little goofy, charming and boyish.”

Three things that Fillion, who is single, likes about Castle, is that it lets him be “kind of smarmy and smartass,” while getting to “exercise [his] comedic muscle.” And, unlike other series that he’s worked on, Fillion’s been given much more freedom to ad lib in the 10 episodes shot for this season.

“This isn’t my first rodeo,” Fillion explains. “I’ve done a couple of TV shows – I’ve done some comedy – and I like to think this is one of my talents, there’s a trust there.”

“The TV gods were smiling on us because there is a part of him that really is this character and I think he’s very in touch with what we’re trying to do,” Marlowe says.

As Fi lion modestly puts it, “I like to say that not everybody knows who I am, but the folks that do, tend to like me.”